As always young Kim was driving too fast, and this time scaring his new girlfriend Georgina, They were returning somewhat sunburnt from a day at the beach, but on the way home Kim had turned-off onto a narrow dirt road that ran up a spur and onto a ridge before descending onto the floor of a narrow valley where it roughly followed along beside a clear stream. “This isn’t the way to your place so where are we going?” asked Georgina.

“I’m taking you to my dope patch, baby. This afternoon I’m ripping some of it out!” he told her, looking at her with a goofy grin.

“Yeah?

“This could be interesting” she thought to herself.

They drove across concrete causeways every half mile as the road meandered but elsewhere the surface was rough and dusty, with a few projective rocks and pot-holes below overhanging forest. Despite a few slight slides the only damage caused by Kim’s reckless driving was a slow water dragon that got squished.

Kim parked the old Fairlane at the end of the dirt road where there was a turnaround bulldozed beneath the tall lean trees of an open eucalypt forest filled with cicadas blazing in the mid-summer sun, swarming from tree to tree across the spaces between the tall crowns.

As they got out of the car Kim felt a drip of sweat slide down his inner-upper arm. He wore only jeans; without a shirt, and George had replaced her bikini with a pair of electric-blue shorts and a sky-blue tank-top. He took her hand and led her from the road up along a barely discernable animal track that dodged between the trees. “Wallabies.” he told her.

After six or seven or eight or more minutes walking steeply uphill they arrived at the marihuana patch. “Check it out!” he said, as he stared at the six and seven foot skunks, glorious in their full flourescence.

“It’s beautiful”, said Genie, not factoring in the price per pound.

Kim reached over the chicken wire fence and using the scissors on his swiss army knife snipped off the top two inches of a dried head he’d ringbarked at his previous visit. He then pulled out a chillum from his back pocket and slid the fat bud into the slightly conical mouth of the chillum.

Together Kim and Georgia smoked it just as it had grown and had been picked, with every molecule in its rightful order and place. He’d never done that before but he’d heard it was extra good but as he passed it back and forth, taking long pulls on it, he didn’t specifically notice the special stone until he became engrossed in the view along the escarpment and he saw a thunderstorm coming from the eastern distance. Thunder was rolling like heathen hooves across the broad plains of a new life in an old life.

“Hey Georgie, we’d better get some of this stuff out while it’s still hot and sticky. Kim pulled open a wall of the fence and began chopping off at the bases with his Swiss Army saw. As blood flowed into his head and the movements became more mechanical his imagination wandered out across the clouds and escarpment and he was a small boy presented with a lean and shining young colt which he was about to mount as his father held its head. But the shaman arrived who had thrown the bones. “That horse will kill him!” he stated emphatically, much to the young sons dismay. His father’s demand that he choose another horse were too much for an obedient son but he remained fascinated by the beautiful animal that was always tethered or following in the dust.

Kim bundled the grass up with their two belts, There must be five pounds here.” He said, proudly.

What’ll you do with it all?” Georgina asked.

“I’ll take you to Bali, Sweetheart. How about that?”

“That would be great Kimmy. I’m the only person I know who hasn’t been to Bali.

Kim looked at her standing there. Only just turned eighteen. Clear smooth throat, long slender limbs, He put the bundle of pot down and took three steps toward her. He stood there looking into her blue eyes. She lifted her head and put out her tongue to meet his as he lightly held her narrow shoulders. Her heels lifted from her light blue thongs but just as he was contemplating slipping his hands into her tank top and sliding his index finger across the bottom of her pert breasts on the thin film of sweat he felt a sharp bite on his left foot, and hopped out of the way, pulling her with him. Looking back he saw a tiger snake slithering away but didn’t recognize it. With both hands he picked up a rock as big as a football and threw it down onto the escaping snake, almost severing its head behind the shoulder, The sinuous head-body junction tilting it’s parts over in different directions, a dry leaf stuck to the mucus on the lower lip of the mouth open trying to hiss.

“How about that? Got the little bastard!” laughed Kim, looking back at her as though he was involved in a game. Two tiny lines of blood on the side of his middle toe showed where it had struck him.

Georgina was freaking out instantly. “That snake bit you!”. She screamed.

“Don’t worry too much. It’s only a brown tree snake.”

“We have to get out of here Kim. You need to get to a hospital!”

“Don’t worry. I told you it was just a tree snake. What they call a night-tiger. It’ll make me a bit sick, that’s all.”

“If it was a tree-snake why wasn’t it in a tree? At night?” she asks him as they move off downhill toward the car with the bundle of fresh pot on his head.

Kim stopped arguing when he felt something in his head like a laser beam stretching from temple to temple and then spreading like oil on a stream

Escapes one day into whirlwinds and dust, galloping across the plain in a circular journey, sweating and rearing. They kept driving to a third farm-house, a fair distance away so the patch would be secure. This one will do!

He stopped the Fairlane out front of a slightly rusted white-painted chainmail fence on a grassy tire-worn area. Kim looked at himself in the rear-view and saw that his eyeballs had haemouraged. “I’ll ask them to send a helicopter. I’m feeling really bad!” he admitted.

The car doors opened together, she came round and tried to help him.

First they heard the barking then two dogs came rushing out at them from behind the fence, very quickly they both got back into the car through the same door, panicking but pretending it wasn’t so bad but the dogs really brought on the venom as their hearts raced. “Someone will come out to cool down these dogs.” Kim managed to say while winding up the window. His leg was on fire as though immersed in boiling water.

“George.” Swap seats. We’ll have to keep going.”

“I’ve never driven a manual” she told him, and proceeded to stall the car four times before he overflowed with rage as he stretched back across the front seat writhing in localized pain as the back of the seat suddenly fell flat as she flattened the battery.

He pushed himself up with one arm to look out of the windscreen “It’s OK, you can clutch it.” They roll across two ditches to get back onto the bitumen, him trying to jam the column shift into gear. “Push in the clutch!” he pleads. She’s crying as they roll down the hill with the dogs following.

Finally he jammed it into gear but the ignition is switched off, Aup blump btump she turns it on, full throttle the Fairlane lunged forward, to the left. Finally off the road and through the fence throwing Kim from his prostrate position on the laid back seat and smashing his chest against the dashboard and his face against the windscreen. The dogs were quick to jump onto the bonnet so their snarling faces were coming and going as he looked down to see that he’d almost bitten off his tongue so that its head was hanging by sinews, and blood was gushing all over his chest.

Georgina was hysterical while his leg stayed on fire and he vomited bloody muddy water. His head-ache was another white rod. Hordes lifted into silhouettes across pyramids of burning heads and melting faces. A baby under your saddle makes for a smooth night around the campfire or the crackling smaller fire private fires where insects were seen in attitudes of deep veneration.

He closed his eyes and everything had the texture of spines and reptilian skin in a baggy kind of huge bag that filled in the sky and all around, even though the stars still shone and the moon still glowed. Every surface of the cave of green-brown flesh was alive and he lay at the darkest corner with spikey olive drab dripping things.

He maintained an irrational hope for a helicopter despite the dogs slobbering against the glass. Georgina’s eyelashes wriggled with little colored eyes “Please, all those years I fantasized. I dreamt of you and me, together, doing it. None of the other girls”, a tiny lid on each pore of her face began peeling open and a baby snake emerged from every one. He could hear and feel all of her internal movements.

Breathing, contracting lights went out to pin-points while his own body was being squealched between two gears. His tears landed on his belly because he was one gear within another in the centre and stiff-armed animals kicked over white concave domes.

A line of neon extended from his middle toe to the centre of his brain with two eyeballs and a tongue sticking out of them.

“I don’t care. I’m dying. Do just one last thing for me. Please, I’m begging you he stated as he undid his pants. She was confused and making hand gestures on outstetched arms.

He tried even harder to convince her to climb on top of him but she was crying, freaking out, “I don’t care.“

“How could you?” He tries to coerce her again, holding her, hearing a helicopter he looked out through the windscreen past her to the sky but looked back to see the skin on her face turning black and swelling into a snake head with a black half shining each scale edge like a tiny beetle’s bum. The twin tip of a tongue ventured out from her glistening pink mouth. It was even blacker, twisting and quivering like his heart.

As he pushed back against the car door the horizontal handle slotted in between two of his ribs. Despite the pain his shuddering head kept tilting back as she drew up over him like a tall slow wave of blood carrying two ebony orchids on its crest. Her snake head arced up and over him in a smooth slow sliding curve through stale air with both cold killer diamond eyes looking down into his. The tiny nostrils flared as the staring jaws opened, stretching ever wider, with lips smiling, drawing closer, with all of the colors reflected in the translucent mucus stretched across the back of the mouth while venom dribbled from holes in the ends of fangs curved like scimitars. The huge black head descended with her lower jaw under his chin while her fangs peirced each side of the back of his neck just on the edge of the hairline. She shattered into a shower of burning mirrored shards as the fangs broke through the back of his eyeballs spraying venom into the sky.

First one, and then thousands of helicopters filled the sky until they were crashing into each other clipping rotors breaking off tails gradually spinning and then spiraling toward to the ground almost always bursting into flames on the way down exploding then or at the time of impact. And the lizard gizzard began to contract.

It got worse, but that will do for now